Although it is by no means a bubblegum-ish album, it doesn’t aspire to be too hard to digest either; Sensor knows the key to getting your message across isn’t underestimating your listener, but instead appealing to their curiosity while establishing a close connection with powerful concepts such as memory and association, which in their turn allow for extrapolation in the mind of the listener that proves itself necessary for a proper engagement with the object.

There are artists whose relevance gets somehow lost in time, a full and complete reading of their work only making sense in a particular context. Others — and sometimes surprisingly so — seem to endure throughout decades on end, usually because of the way they perceive and depict the world around them, but also due to their almost prophetic view of society and its inherent idiosyncrasies. Andy Warhol belongs to the latter category. Even if his visual work per se is often seen as dated — researcher Mike Evans discusses the gap between Pop art and Pop culture by saying that “Pop art managed to reflect “real” pop, but hardly to emulate it; it would always remain one step behind, rather than ahead of, the times” —, it’s his epiphanic take on mass behaviour and the decadence of Western civilisation that ultimately provides a fertile ground for contemporary discussion.

Trevor Sensor’s debut album Andy Warhol's Dream belongs to that omnipresent cloud of social and behavioural commentary which derives from the Pittsburgh-born artist’s somewhat dystopian prophecies. The theme is properly addressed by Sensor himself in a press release, pointing out how alive and well Warhol’s “15 minutes of fame” prediction is today: “I’m only really referencing Warhol as a vehicle for the ultimate representation of celebrity culture because of his repeated Marilyn Monroe or Elvis paintings or whatever," he admits, adding that “now we’re in a post-God society that is finding new golden calves to worship, that is moving beyond that.”

Whilst a somehow post-Nietzschean reading of Sensor’s album can indeed be made, Andy Warhol’s Dream arrives in a post-idol era, when the frontiers between relevance and non-relevance become increasingly blurred and many do the crossover back and forth numerous times. However, it’s also the slightly nostalgic undertone of his music that sends us back to those transformative years — the 60s and 70s — building a proper background for the message he is communicating.

Produced by Richard Swift, Brandon Darner, and Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado (who already has an impressive curriculum that includes the Lemon Twigs, Alex Cameron, and his own band’s latest full-length adventure), Andy Warhol’s Dream excels in both form and content. A surprisingly agglutinative characteristic of the album emerges through a palpable paradox that comes from the combination of Sensor’s distinctive wise-beyond-his-years voice and a fresh, yet not completely cynical approach of the theme — after all, not everything is disenchantment here.

Opening with ‘High Beams’, an absolutely beautiful song which was also my first contact with Sensor’s music, the album is dense and engaging in equal measure. Throughout tracks such as ‘Sedgwick’ (an obvious homage to one of Warhol’s original Superstars), ‘In Hollywood, Everyone is Plastic’, or ‘The Money Gets Bigger’, the musician seems to accomplish his communication-oriented goal he first told us about while discussing the book he is currently reading: “overall, I align with such artists and thinkers like Hegel and Tolstoy in thinking that art's main purpose is to pack big, important ideas about our world and ourselves into forms and mediums that are easier to digest and stick in one's memory - that art isn't just for art's sake or for just entertainment for us to escape to from our lives, but rather explore it deeper and give it greater contemplation.”

Andy Warhol’s Dream does exactly that. Although it is by no means a bubblegum-ish album, it doesn’t aspire to be too hard to digest either; Sensor knows the key to getting your message across isn’t underestimating your listener, but instead appealing to their curiosity while establishing a close connection with powerful concepts such as memory and association, which in their turn allow for extrapolation in the mind of the listener that proves itself necessary for a proper engagement with the object.

An auspicious debut for Trevor’s career, Andy Warhol’s Dream’s only faux-pas is that it probably set the bar too high: it’s an incredibly solid, balanced, and overall beautiful album. I can’t wait to see him perform it live.